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This reminds me of the Avrocar made by A.V. Roe. "They" had great dreams for it but it never flew off its ground effect. If it tried to go too high or too fast, it had horrible stability problems.

These days you might deal with the stability issue with a computer. That would result in a machine that would crash the millisecond its computer failed though. I will believe this new machine when they demonstrate it flying higher and faster.

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/mufonontario/avro/avrocar.html

I need an explanation, that isn't flares, cause that explanation stinks.

Ok, I'll play your silly game if you just want to throw the truth out because you don't like it. It wuz aliens. Seriously, as an ex Gulf War I crew chief on A-10s there is little doubt in my mind that they are flares dropped from A-10s. That is *exactly* what flares look like from a great distance that are dropped from an A-10. The kind of flares I am talking about are not roadside flares but they are much much bigger and brighter and descend on parachutes. They are used to light up a battle field and they do a mighty fine job of it. I saw show on television where they superimposed actual video footage of the lights over a daylight shot of the mountain range from the exact same perspective that the video was shot from. The "lights" disappeared one by one on the video at the same point they would have dropped below the peak of the mountain (the flares were dropped on the other side of the mountain). Really, the glove fit perfectly.

If you don't believe me here is some more:
http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2007/j an/m26-005.shtml
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4041

You insensitive clod! We have never visited the moon.

Capricorn One
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077294/

NASA - Response To FOXTV's 'Moon Conspiracy'
http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2001/f eb/m16-007.sh

Did Apollo astronauts really visit the Moon
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23feb_2 .htm

Lt. Robert Jacobs in 1964 describes what happened to him during a similar test @ Vandenberg AFB.

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/sdi/sdiarchive /vandenberg.ra/

Sure. It's been a while since I've read specifically on this subject, so these are a bit old, but I got a lot out of these:

• Crossan, John Dominic (1991): The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. North Blackburn, CollinsDove.
• Lane Fox, Robin (1986): Pagans and Christians. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Lane Fox, Robin (1991): The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
• Romer, John (1988): Testament: The Bible And History. London, Michael O'Mara.

I thought The Unauthorized Version, especially, was brilliant, although his opinions on the dating of the Gospels are unorthodox (he thinks John was the earliest - but he makes a good case). Testament was good for a broad introduction. Also, more recently, articles and book reviews from time to time in The Skeptic , particularly by Tim Callahan, although I haven't read any of his books.

Spouting claims like this without any evidence doesn't help your cause either. Please englighten me.

Sorry; I assumed since you mentioned them that you knew who they were, they are very well known. The Skeptic's Dictionary has good summaries of the skeptical position on both Velikovksy and Sitchin. Velikovsky was not a scientist, as you described him, but a psychiatrist; similarly, Sitchin is a journalist, not a Hebrew scholar. It was said of Velikovsky that astronomers thought his astronomy was ludicrous, but were impressed by his history, while historians were impressed by his astronomy, but not his history. (The same could probably be said of Sitchin, though fewer academics ever noticed his existence, as opposed to Velikovsky.) And as a graduate in both astrophysics and history, I think both his astronomy and his history are rubbish!

References and Links please...

Well, I gave you my reasoning as to why that slab story is dubious at best, we can discuss that. I'm not about to go through google and dredge up a bunch of dodgy pravda.ru stories (I call it pravda.ru and not Pravda because it actually has no connection with the old Soviet newspaper of that name, AFAIK). But one pravda.ru exclusive that came up recently was about an expedition to Tunguska to prove that the 1908 explosion was caused by a UFO. Even the ufologists on the ufo-updates mailing list found this an absurd, unscientific thing to do. And sure enough, the expedition found the "proof" they set out to find.

The problem is that not everything that involves the space program is done for (or will result in) financial gain. For example, consider the recent Mars rover missions. By all accounts, these missions have increased our knowledge of the Red Planet by several times more than all of the previous missions combined. Are these missions profitable? Is anybody making money off of them (aside from the private sector contractors that won the bids to do a lot of the work that went into them?) Probably not.

Ok, so we know more about Martian geology? So what? Does the information have any practical use? Will it further spaceflight? If no, why shouldn't this be part of R&D for commercial spaceflight operations?

Yes, I'm a little grumpy about NASA - the organization that spent and failed to at the very least fire those directly responsible for ignoring the warnings of engineers and causing the destruction of two shuttles and the deaths of several astronauts. But the question goes beyond my petty grumpiness.

But does that mean that such a mission is not profitable in other, less tangible ways? Aside from the more zealous libertarian types who only want to see their tax dollars spent on tanks or the extreme fundamentalist types who view exploration of the heavens as blasphemy, most people would probably agree that expanding our knowledge of the universe that we live in is a Good Thing (TM). It's profitable from an intellectual and scientific (if not economic) standpoint. And it's hardwired into our very being; curiosity (and the desire to satisfy that curiosity) is one of the things that makes us human.

We can spend billions of dollars on spacecraft that are built with a hodgepodge of metric/standard instructions and go careening off into oblivion, have parts installed upside down and create 300 million dollar thuds in the desert, or spacecraft that have bugs in the radio that scramble the useful data that would otherwise be spent. As a public organization, NASA - nor the federal government in general - simply does not have the mindset required to generate an honest return on the investment that is collected from the public under threat of jail. Or, if you resist, death. Does knowing that water really does flow downhill on Mars make you feel any better about such a massive grab - which is never enough? I know of a certain school in a certain urban area that attracts some of the brightest kids in the city. A science teacher spent over 10 years teaching 5th and 6th graders the wonders of the scientific world. While NASA execs spend public money on mahogany panels and private jets for their senior accountants and public relations wonks, this school has textbooks that refer to manned space stations in the future tense. Every single year the teacher discovers that at least 1/3 of the students don't know that eggs come from chickens. Most of them have never seen any kind of bird in person other than a pigeon, or any mammal other than human, squirrel, cat, dog, rat, mouse. But I suppose that listening to thunder on the moon of some distant planet (which, if not for a gifted engineer who probably had modern textbooks growing up, would never have been possible because testing the radio was deemed too expensive before launch) provides a much better return on the public investment.

If public funding of space missions is so important and the public is so accepting, then all funding of NASA and similar programs should be through voluntary contributions. When you file your 1040 there should be a checkbox to contribute above and beyond the absolutely minimum collected by the government. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on thing that generates no return is deplorable. -DEFECIT- spending of hundreds of billions that generate little return is such a horribly unacceptable concept that words fail me.

Yes, there are commercial products that r

> Who else in the world would blame aliens because they cant open their garage door.
If you want to really know, try this guy.

a good description:

"When a film canister was full, it was jettisoned back to earth
over Hawaii in a ceramic container that deployed a parachute.
These were retrieved in mid-air by Air Force C-119 airplanes
(the so-called "Flying Boxcars") that were outfitted with long
snag lines strung between twin tails. If the planes missed, the
canisters would splash down and float in the Pacific Ocean for
up to two days so the Navy could get to them. After two days,
salt plugs would dissolve and the canisters would sink into the
ocean depths to avoid unfriendly retrieval. Even so, at least
one canister is known to have gotten into enemy hands."

from http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2002/m ay/m15-016.shtml

That's all [insert name here] bullship. Don't know who to blame but I searched for more data and found several pictures like that.
Like this (don't know exposition time) and this (five minute exposition, march 11).
All have similar streaks, the only difference is the streak on the "UFO" picture seens to be alone and probably move faster (since it's a 15 seconds exposition) or that's just zoom effect. And probably was the first to be photographed, so that's might be the reason it created so much hype between NASA people.
This is what I belive to be the original image, taken from this page.
There is some discussion here but I didn't read it all.

"Classified" is not a specific designation, yet "Secret" and "Top Secret" are, I mixed the terms a bit. Here is a link giving a definition of document classifications

The last time I heard about weird electical lightning formations was when they were throwing around ideas and someone had a suspiscious picture.

from space.com
While it's not likely Columbia was struck by lightning flying through clear skies some 40 miles high, it is possible that some kind of electrical event took place. At least one image is reported to exist in which it appears something like lightning is striking, or discharging from, the shuttle as it approached the California coast.

Also a little more detail in this article.

I never heard anything else so apparantly they decided that the picture was fake or irrelevant, I guess. I wasn't able to find any more current info.

You malodorus dolt! Everybody knows that the transitor was reverse engineered from ALIEN TECHNOLOGY!

blakespot

Well, was it the size of an old bug, or new bug?

Because the New Bugs do come from outer space!

I was skeptical, but:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20010528/mete or.html
http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/1999/f eb/m14-013.shtml
http://www.theblob.info/xtras/kecksburg.pdf

During the bru-ha-ha around building an observatory on Mount Graham, which was built over protest about such things as native's rights (the Apache consider Mount Graham to be a sacred mountain, and building an observatory atop it is sort of like building a research reactor in the Ka'aba) (whew), the Pope stepped in and said he would fund the damn thing. One of the pieces of the Church's reasons for doing so, was (in a bit of absurdity even Ianesco couldn't outdo), that if there were aliens out there, it was important to know about it right away, so that they could all be converted to Christianity. I, for one, find this completely bizarre and hilarious. But maybe I'm no better than those folks who laughed at the 4.5 billion year suggestion. Mount graham story here.